


Broken heart flowers

by Dreamer_of_Improbable_Dreams



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, captain america: civil war - Fandom
Genre: Bucky Barnes has questionable morality, Cheating, Dubious Morality, Flower Language, Hanahaki Disease, Implied/Referenced Cheating, M/M, Tragedy, Unrequited Love, Unrequited Steve/Tony - Freeform, tony stark in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-20
Updated: 2018-09-18
Packaged: 2019-06-13 16:46:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15368934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dreamer_of_Improbable_Dreams/pseuds/Dreamer_of_Improbable_Dreams
Summary: Tony loves Steve, but Steve loves Bucky. Civil War happens and the ache in Tony’s chest blooms into flowers that choke him as they fall from his mouth.But Bucky thinks Tony’s flowers are the most beautiful love he’s ever seen, and he wonders what it would be like to be loved like that.Civil War Hanahaki disease AU





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I saw a post on hanahaki disease on a fb AO3 group and the idea really caught me. I ended up spending all day painfully typing this out on my phone (which was awful. Kudos to anyone who does this regularly).  
> This isn’t my first Marvel fic, but it is the first one that’s gotten finished enough to be posted. Hopefully I’ll have time to finish the rest of them soon!  
> (Also can I use this as the free square of my MCU kink bingo?)

Tony knows he used to love Steve. Dreamed that maybe Steve would love him too one day. He’d known it was hopeless, but he’d been happy, with his secret love curled in his chest and smiles meant only for his teammate.  
But then there was a war.  
Steve found Bucky and an ache began to grow in Tony’s chest.  
No matter what he said, how much he begged, he couldn’t get his friend to listen. And the ache in his chest steadily grew.  
After the battle in the airport he finds himself choking, his chest heavy as something tears at his throat on the way up. He already knows what’s going to happen before he spits the petal out on his palm, but it’s still a shock that makes the world go glassy around him. The little purple hyacinth flower sits in his palm, unassuming, and screams his sorrow.  
Please forgive me.  
Steve, I’m sorry.  
Tony crushes the flower in his palm and throws it to the floor. He knows now that any hope he might have had that Steve would love him back is gone.  
Steve doesn’t care for him anymore.  
He puts on the suit and flies to Siberia.

He never would have thought their friendship meant so little to Steve. He thought they were friends, but now he knows. He knows his chest is heavy with red dahlia, blooming out of control and spilling out of his mouth. The petals bitter on his tongue as he looks at Steve’s hard face. At Barnes, standing behind the captain, wide eyed.  
“Bucky is my friend.” Steve says, like that fixes the fact Tony just watched that very man crush the life out of his parents a second ago. Tony’s chest aches and it’s hard to breath and the sweet taste of rose joins the bitterness of Dahlias and betrayal in his mouth.  
“So was I.” He says.  
And then he tries to kill Barnes. Flower petals filling the space behind the iron man mask as he struggles to breath.  
In the end Steve has him pinned, tears the HUD away from his face in a shower of red petals as he chokes. For a moment he thinks Steve is going to use his shield to cut off Tony’s head, but instead he crushes his heart.  
He leaves Tony lying there coughing up red flowers that look like drops of blood in the snow.  
Anemones and red dahlias and rose petals the dark crimson of blood.  
And here and there, little purple hyacinths begging for forgiveness.

 

*

The soldier- Bucky looked back as Steve carried him out of the bunker, sick with the pain of losing his arm in a blast that seared his nerve endings.  
He took one glance back over Steve’s shoulder as they left and saw Stark lying there as a garden bloomed around him.  
He’s left thinking about it long after they leave the cold snow of Siberia. He wakes from nightmares where he stands over Stark’s corpse and watches bloody roses and anemones bloom from his cold blue lips. The horror growing in him as dahlias in dark crimson burst from the shell of his blue crystal heart. The smell of hyacinths fills his nose as they bloom open on Stark’s chest until his body is a garden in the snow.  
I loved him, they say.  
Bucky wakes up shaking from these dreams.

He’s sitting in the Wakandan gardens when Steve finds him. He’s holding a dark red rose and the thorns have scratched his fingers.  
“He loved you so beautifully,” Bucky tells his friend as he sits down.  
“Who did what?” Asks Steve, and maybe he honestly didn’t know, but Bucky’s nose will never forget the rich floral smell of that fight in Siberia.  
“Stark. He grew a garden in his chest for love of you,” Bucky says.  
Steve looks uncomfortable and miserable and Bucky suddenly thinks that maybe Steve never bothered to learn the language of flowersickness.  
He hands the rose to Steve.  
“It’s too bad you didn’t love him back. To be loved like that is something special,” He doesn’t know why, but it makes him wistful. “The garden in his chest will kill him soon. He’ll have to cut it out.” Bucky says as he leaves.  
Steve is left sitting on the garden bench with an assortment of flowers lying beside him. Crimsons and reds and purples, familiar.  
He wonders if he could have loved Tony, who held so much beauty in his heart, and he thinks maybe he could have. But now it’s too late, and surely Stark has cut the garden out of his heart along with any love he once held for Steve.

 

*

Bucky and Steve fall together like it was inevitable. Their love long reaching and enduring and finally coming to fruition with curious kisses and lingering touches. Life is better. The rogue avengers are pardoned. They come back to New York and live in a tower with the name on the side.  
Stark is there to greet them when they step off the jet onto the roof and his face is cold as he shakes Steve’s hand. He doesn’t look at Bucky.

“He cut his flowers out,” Steve tells him later.

It’s strange, being around so many people. Bucky finds himself wandering the tower at night, unable to sleep.  
When he sleeps it’s fitful and he dreams of Stark sitting beside him in a snowy garden pulling flowers from his mouth. In his dream Stark spits little white blossoms into his palm that smell like jasmine and wipes his mouth. “They cut out my heart. I can’t grow flowers anymore. No more flowers for Steve,” the Stark in his dream tells him, crushing his handful of delicate jasmine scented flowers. He has dead leaves in his hair and a snapdragon in the corner of his mouth.  
When Bucky wakes up the scent of jasmine lingers and he wanders the halls like a ghost.

Stark haunts his dreams at night and Bucky watches him in the daylight and wonders what it must be like to love Steve and not be loved back. Wonders what kind of flowers would grow in his own chest to choke his breath if Steve felt nothing for him. He shudders at the thought and is grateful for the love Steve shares with him.

His fascination with Stark grows. The man is cold and aloof and viciously clever and his smiles never reach his wide brown eyes.  
“Sometimes it happens,” the Widow tells him. “When they cut out the flowers they cut out everything, not just the love that’s poisoning the subject,” she thinks that Stark cut his heart out, and his emotions along with his love for Steve. “I never realized he loved him so much,” she says, like she’s irritated at missing a vital piece of intel.

Stark smells like hyacinth and bergamot underneath his cologne when Bucky comes too close.  
His warm brown eyes iced over like mirrors, the amber of them murky.  
He’s keeping secrets, Bucky thinks.  
Steve doesn’t see it.  
“What’s it like to be loved like that?” He asks Steve. Steve looks surprised. “I love you, and you love me, isn’t that the same?” He replies.  
“No. You loved Peggy once, and I forgot to love you for a long time. Neither of us ever grew flowers,” he’s fascinated by it. By Stark and his heart garden.  
“It was beautiful,” he says.  
He wonders what it would be like to have someone love him like that. So powerfully and beautifully that flowers bloomed in their chest and filled their lungs and choked them.  
What’s it like to die on the beauty of your love? He wonders.

 

His fascination grows, and he watches Stark. He begins to notice the small and almost unnoticeable things he does to take care of the team. Replacing items and making sure favourite foods are always available.  
One night Bucky stands in the shadows outside Stark’s lab and watches him hold an animated discussion with his robots. watches as his face breaks into a warm smile and he dances with the robots around him to music Bucky can’t hear through the soundproof glass.  
He sees the way the other man is constantly keeping an eye on the spider child, dropping everything at a moments notice to make sure the boy is safe.  
He’s a good man. Soft and caring and struggling to keep himself safe behind his brittle armour of sarcasm and indifference.  
Bucky can’t help but wonder why Steve couldn’t love him.

When Bucky asks Steve he blushes and his shoulders hunch defensively. “It doesn’t matter anymore anyway. He cut out his love for me already. He can’t love anyone anymore,” Steve replies angrily and Bucky doesn’t see him again until hours later.  
Bucky thinks of snapdragons.  
“I want him to love me,” he tells the empty room Steve stormed out of long minutes ago.

He catches Stark standing on a balcony one night. There’s a party going on inside and the music is muted through the windows. The balcony is lit up dimly by the ambient light spilling from inside and the city below. Stark is there, hunched over as he coughs into his hand, deep wracking heaves that hurt to listen to.  
“You lied.” Bucky tells him, standing close behind. Stark whirls in shock and Bucky can see the petals caught on his lips and his hands full of flowers. He opens his mouth like he wants to lie, but instead coughs out more petals.  
“They couldn’t cut it out. There was too much damage already. It was easier to just let everyone believe they had,” Stark says, heavy, like he doesn’t have the energy to lie. To grow more snapdragons and fill the air with the bergamot smell of mock orange blossoms.  
He seems so small, standing in the dark in front of Bucky with his chest full of sorrow flowers that steal his breath.  
Bucky steps forward and touches him. Caresses his face and tips his chin up and looks into his eyes. Breaths in his breath heavy with hyacinth and roses and sorrow.  
“Its beautiful,” Bucky tells him.  
“I want you to love me like that,” he whispers against Stark’s lips as he leans in. And then he kisses him, uses Stark’s shocked gasp to lick into his mouth and taste flowers.  
He wants to kiss it all away.  
He wants to kiss him until those brown eyes warm and he smiles and he tastes like ambrosia and dandelions.  
“I want you to love me,” Bucky begs. Stark loves so beautifully.  
Against him Stark is still with shock and confusion.  
“Let me love you back,” Bucky begs him, and Stark is lonely and sad and his heart is a garden blooming for love.  
Bucky feels it when he breaks and gives in and kisses back. A tiny sob at the back of his throat and then he’s pushing into Bucky’s arms in desperation. When he coughs and spits a flower into his hand it’s a yellow jonquil, and Bucky knows his please have been answered.  
He buries his face in Stark’s hair and holds him close.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve begins to realize

_”I love you, don’t you want it?”_ Stark asks, holding out his heart in his hand. Blood runs down his wrist and drips from his elbow. It flutters weakly in his palm, sick and fleshy and glossy with blood and flowers grow and spill from the cut off veins and arteries. His wide brown eyes are cold and dull, like a murky pond frozen over, even though his mouth smiles widely. In the centre of his chest the broken glass of the arc reactor shines, shards of it falling to Stark’s feet. And growing round his legs red peonies and marigolds. Steve wakes up screaming.  
It’s been haunting him for months now. What Bucky said in that garden in Wakanda, the little bouquet of flowers he left for Steve on the bench. Most of all the smell. The rich sweet scent of flowers cutting through the harsh smell of frozen stone and ice. _”He loved you so beautifully.”_ Bucky had said.  
He knows. God help him, he _knows_.  
He wraps himself up in Bucky. Trying to hide away from the memories and those cold empty eyes and the regret. God the regret, it eats him up inside. Standing there in his uniform like the symbol of righteousness and inside his stomach is a black pit of guilt and misery.  
Because he lied.  
There’s a man out there in the world who can never love again because Steve told a lie. Not his first lie, or his last, but his worst. So small, it was such a small lie, but look what it did. He knows its eating him up inside, his guilt twisting things, his perceptions. Bucky smells like pine and peach blossoms.  
He gave Steve a sprig of vetch yesterday with a smirk and a kiss.“This is mine, but I want you to have it,” He’d told Steve.  
Steve loves him.Can love only him.He needs to stop feeling these feelings. Stop with the nightmares he has of Stark asking him why he lied. Sitting there with red dahlias spilling out of his mouth as he begs Steve, _“Just tell the truth, just tell me you love me so I can breath.”_ the dream always ends when Stark chokes on his throat full of flowers and his body convulsing until it grows into a field of flowers. The leaves and stems forcing through his skin in a sickening way until Steve wakes up with his stomach churning.

He tries to focus on Bucky, he loves Bucky, who came back to him against all odds, who loves him back. He clings to that, like it absolves him of the lie he told. The sin of it. He had to choose Bucky, it was never a choice, how was he to know that Stark would end up cutting his heart out over the lie? But he knows its not true.He could have said something before it was too late. Not acted on it, no, never acted on it, but said enough to keep those flowers from blooming where they should never have grown.  
Bucky is different then he was, Before. He’s colder, his eyes sharper, giving less away and seeing more. No matter how close Steve holds him theres always a little shard inside that never melts. He’s not just Steve’s Bucky anymore, there will always be a piece of him that is the Winter Soldier. Cold and calculating and shaped by people more monster then men. Its the small things that Steve tries to ignore, not to notice, that are the most glaring. Things his Bucky would have never said, never done. He tries not to think about them. Bucky will remember. He’ll learn.Steve ignores it.

He tries to make his peace with Stark.He tries not to let the way Tony’s eyes are glass flat and empty get to him, but it does.The man he loved is gone, cut out with all the warmth in his heart.All for a little lie that Steve told. Told himself.  
Tony used to be bright, and vibrant, lighting up the room like the sun. Loud and obnoxious and impossible to look away from, even when Steve wanted to strangle him for his contrary ways.He used to smile at Steve when he understood something modern, and laugh when Steve pretended to be baffled by the simplest of technology.  
Steve misses his warm brown eyes, the way they glittered when he laughed.It’s his fault

He tries not to look at Stark too much, because it hurts to see what he’s done, but he notices the change. Its slight, a tiny warming of his eyes, like the ice over them is thinning. A tremble, like fear that quivers through his fingers when all the Avengers are assembled together in the common areas. He smells of sweet bitter chemicals that sting Steve’s nose and smell vaguely familiar.He hopes maybe Tony is healing, but his nightmares only get worse.  
He sees Tony wrapped in a cage of flowers, the vines springing forth from his chest. And over him looms a dark figure that plucks the flowers from his open lips and kisses him.  
Steve wakes up crying.

 

One day he comes home early from a mission. He’s tired, doesn’t want a fuss. Just wants to slip in quietly and take a shower without anyone noticing he’s home. He knows they don’t know he’s watching, because he sees them through the window. Bucky has Tony backed against the guardrail of the balcony, and for a moment, Steve is afraid. Afraid for Tony who looks small and fragile beside Bucky’s bulk and strength. In that instant he’s afraid the Winter Soldier has made an appearance, to finish the job he started with Tony’s parents, or perhaps revenge. Or just finishing that fight in Siberia that Steve never wants to think of again. Adrenaline tightens his body and fear clogs his throat and he’s taking a step towards the door when Tony looks up at Bucky’s face. Steve stops. Tony’s face is open and vulnerable and his eyes are wide with desperation. He looks so soft. Unease grows in Steve’s stomach as he watches Bucky’s hand come up to caress Tony’s cheek. He turns away before he can see the way Tony leans into it.  
He comes home one evening to find Bucky with a dog rose tucked behind his ear. He looks pleased with himself behind the book he’s reading, and a dread settles in Steve’s stomach. He has no reason for it, no explanation, only the instinct rising in him thats kept him alive through many battles. “What did you do?” The smell of pine and peach blossoms and dog rose rising in his nose. “What have you done, Bucky? What have you done?” He doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to let his conscious mind put together what his unconscious has known now, perhaps, for a while. “Oh, you’ve finally noticed?” Bucky asks, looking up from his book, like he isn’t cracking open Steve’s whole universe with his cold blue eyes. Steve remembers the bench in Wakanda, Bucky’s fascination, the flowers in his hand. “Tell me you didn’t.” Steve begs. “I was getting tired of waiting for you to notice.”  
It’s like stepping out onto solid ground only to have it crumble beneath your feet. The vertigo of betrayal of something thought to be unbreakable. “Why?” Steve begs. “Because he was beautiful, and I wanted.” Bucky tells him.

He’d known there was something cold in Bucky since he got him back, something a little dark, a little twisted. A warping of the sense of right and wrong. Not a lack of consideration, but that kind of entitled cruelty only a child has, because they didn’t know any better. Bucky doesn’t mean to be cruel, but sometimes he doesn’t know, can’t know, because how can he? It doesn’t stop Steve’s heart from cracking open, and for a moment he wonders if this is what Stark felt, in that moment when Steve turned his back on him. He wonders if the aching in the back of his throat, the slicing pain in his heart, are flowers growing. If maybe he’s about to start choking out flowers. Maybe Bucky would come back to him if he started spilling marigolds from his mouth. He thinks of Stark’s brilliant red dahlia’s, thick petals sticking to his lips as he struggled for breath.He wants to spit out his own betrayal at Bucky’s feet, maybe then Bucky would be fascinated with him too.  
He feels trapped, stuck standing in his own too big body that refuses to move as Bucky steps up in front of him.  
“All that love, all those flowers, they where meant for you, and I wanted them. You left them lying in the dirt, like they where worthless. All that beauty grown out of emotion for you. And you turned away like it didn’t mean anything.” The intensity burning in Bucky’s gaze is painful. Steve can’t look him in the eye, has to turn away. Guilt boils in his stomach with his anger and grief. “I thought I was enough for you? I thought we where enough for each other! Instead you have to go after a man with his heart cut out? How could you choose someone who can’t even love when I’m here? Isn’t my love enough?”  
It hurts. It hurts and he wants to hit something. Use his strength to obliterate something like he wants to obliterate his feelings. He wants to hit Bucky. Hurt him. He wonders if thats what they are now. Wonders if they came out of the ice all cold hard edges slicing each other until they ran with blood and pain. All warmth leached away under decades of frozen water. Their hearts cold and hard and smashing into each other and they call it love for want of a better word. Suddenly he’s furious. Tony was his for the taking once, warm and bright as the rising sun. And now he’s not, and Bucky has whatever’s left of him instead. “Why him? Why the fuck did it have to be _him_ ?” Even as the words drop out of his mouth he realizes, he's jealous. Gut wrenchingly, ravenously, jealous. He loves Bucky, he does, but in that moment he wants to beat him down to the ground. Wants them to throw themselves together and hammer at each other with all the wrath and betrayal and sickness running between them. Wants to drive them together like titans and batter each other until the super soldier serum in their veins runs dry and they tire and cease to heal and are left pathetic and exhausted in the wreckage of their lives, unable to lift a hand against each other. “It could have been anyone, Buck, why’d you have to choose him? I loved him, and I turned my back on that for you. Why’d it have to be him?” He’s heartbroken. Its surprising how much it hurts. “You made a mistake- Here, hush now, let me dry your eyes,” He didn’t realize he was blind with tears until Bucky wipes them away softly. “You made a mistake Stevie, you threw all that love away, cause you thought you had something better maybe, or maybe you’re just the kind of good man who isn’t greedy enough to think he can have everything and you decided you had to choose. So you made a choice and pretended you didn’t, even to yourself. Me? I’m not a good man, I’m greedy. I want what I want. And I saw Stark and I wanted him. But then we came back and you looked at him and thought he cut out his heart. But thats where you made your mistake Stevie,” Bucky forces Steve to meet his gaze, and his eyes are bright and cold and full of desire. He takes the dog rose from behind his ear, so delicate, and holds it up to his nose to breath in its rich wild scent before offering it to Steve. “You think he cut out his heart, his love, for you. But you’re wrong. He loves you just as much now as he ever did, and every day he suffers, and chokes out his love for you cause it wont stop blooming in his chest. He’s so desperate to breath, to be loved, that he’d do anything for me, let me do anything to him.” Steve is numb with shock, all the pain and anger flooding out of him with the revelation. His hand comes up to take the rose from Bucky without his volition, bringing it to his face to breath in the smell of it. The smell that’s been surrounding Tony, hidden under the harsh chemical smell of mouth wash and soap. He breaths it in, and knows without a doubt that this rose fell from Tony’s lips. Bucky smiles at him, it isn’t quite right, far from the wide easy smirk it used to be, it’s a little crooked and something about it unsettles the soul. “The dog rose, pain and pleasure. He’s so sweet for me.” Bucky slides up close, presses his body against Steve’s and his voice is deep and husky in his ear as he whispers like a filthy secret. “Don’t you want to find out what kind of flowers we could coax from him together?”  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Red peony - devotion  
> Marigold - despair, grief  
> Pine (spruce) - hope in adversity  
> Peach blossom - I am your captive  
> Vetch - I cling to you  
> Red dahlia - betrayal  
> Dog rose - pain and pleasure 
> 
> (its a little late here, so hopefully I didn't miss any, let me know if I did)

**Author's Note:**

> Jonquil: love me, desire for affection returned  
> Anemone: forsaken  
> Dark crimson rose: mourning  
> Purple hyacinth: I’m sorry, please forgive me, sorrow  
> Red dahlia: betrayal, dishonesty  
> Snapdragon: deception  
> Dead leaves: sadness  
> Ambrosia: reciprocated love  
> Dandelion: faithfulness, happiness  
> Mock orange blossom: deceit


End file.
